Data integrity is an important issue for many data storage systems and subsystems. Data warehouse applications tend to be very I/O (input/output) intensive, as the database may read trillions of bytes of information. Data warehouse systems typically require specialized servers that can support the typical processing that is observed in data warehouses. Most data warehouses are bi-modal and have batch windows (usually in the evenings) when new data is loaded, indexed, and summarized. The server is desired to have dynamic CPU and RAM resources, and the database management system must be able to dynamically reconfigure its resources to accommodate these shifts in processing. I/O performance is a common concern for data warehouses. The potential bottleneck also depends on user workload and application access patterns. When a system is constrained by I/O capabilities, it is I/O bound, or has an I/O bottleneck.
Disk scrubbing technology (DST) is designed to protect against bad disk sectors in data storage. Bad sectors can form on hard disk drive areas that are not accessed for long periods of time. DST offers a proactive approach to address data integrity. In the context of a system comprising a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) configuration, DST offers a proactive approach to address data integrity and helps maintain the system by scanning for bad sectors or parity errors in RAID sets. Specifically, the system may use DST to reconstruct bad sectors from other sectors, and at the same time the system may use DST to detect parity inconsistency.